My Story

Hi, I’m Julia Zaslow.

What do I do?

I teach entrepreneurs to use powerful internet marketing strategies to grow their businesses and make more profits.

I am trained in nutrition and have a large network of colleagues in the holistic and integrative health fields so I tend to work primarily with health professionals, but the marketing principles and techniques I teach apply to all businesses.

My goal is to help you achieve your business goals faster than you ever thought possible by illuminating the often murky, confusing world of internet marketing.

I help you cut a more direct path to success.

Here’s the story of how I got into this…

I’m a California girl raised in the mountains of Santa Cruz. I spent my childhood roaming the hills around my house that included meadows, creeks, and redwoods. I climbed trees, played soccer, and was a tomboy through and through.

In high school, I was a nerd. Although it didn’t help my social life at the time, I’m proud of it now. I liked most subjects and did well in them, but really excelled in science and math. In fact, I got the “Science Award” senior year and spent many an afternoon tutoring my fellow students.

Ready for an adventure in college, I went clear across the country to Brown University without ever having visited. I was so excited about the open curriculum and the prospect of branching out that in my first year, I took 8 courses in 8 different areas, including political science, psychology, art, dance, literature, ethics, logic and architecture. I thought I was going to major in psychology (coincidence that both of my parents were psychologists?).

But after all that, I discovered that I really missed science and math. Just days before my sophomore year started, I studied the course guide and found a major (called a “concentration” at Brown) that looked unbelievably exciting: “Geology-Physics/Mathematics”.

Before I could start to doubt myself, fortunately for me, I was assigned a fabulous female advisor who was a kick-butt seismologist, so I stuck to it. I focused in seismology like her, and discovered that seismology actually involves very little field work (maybe the occasional trip to the country to place an array of seismometers or return months later to check why one’s not working) and mostly a lot of long lonely hours in a windowless lab in front of a computer writing software programs to analyze waveform data.

I was super excited at first, but then became miserable as the weeks sitting programming at the computer became months and then years. After a soul sucking post-college year doing this, I looked around for what was next. This was in 1997, the year that the internet exploded (or so it seemed to me) and every company in the world was looking for a webmaster to create their website or run their existing one. I jumped on the train and became a webmaster. (This was a thrilling title back in those days—it garnered a lot of respect and jokes about whips).

I was lucky to work for a high tech company that was actually making tons of dough and growing like gangbusters. So four years later I was managing a web team comprised of 7 people, moved form the IT department to marketing, and was given the more grown-up title of “Web Producer.”

Despite being in my 20s (ostensibly twenty-somethings have plenty of energy), this job just about killed me and I abandoned ship in 2001. After an interlude that included a whole bunch of things that had nothing to do with computer or the internet, I was looking for my next move when my best friend pointed out that I had been blathering about nutrition since I was 14. I was that super annoying friend who was always reporting on what the latest book said you should eat/not eat and was continually trying the latest diet-du-jour. I’ve been a vegetarian, a raw foodie, a no-fried food militant, a paleo, a chronic cleanser…

One day my friend asked me “Why don’t you become a nutritionist?”

Amazingly, this had never occurred to me.

She was right. I was obsessed with nutrition and loved teaching (admonishing) others about their dietary habits. Around that same time, a Bauman College marketing brochure ended up on my kitchen table, placed there by a visiting friend who was considering the Natural Chef program. I had never heard of the school, but (lo and behold), they were located right there in Santa Cruz where I was living at the time, and they offered a two year nutrition program that resonated with me immediately. I enrolled the next week.

Two years later, I happily left Bauman with a Nutrition Consultant certificate in hand and big dreams of a flourishing nutrition practice, busy with clients flowing in and out the door all day long.

I promptly went broke. (Or nearly so)

Had I ever launched a small service-based business, by myself, from scratch?

No.

Did I have any clue how to do it?

It turns out no.

I thought I did from my years in corporate marketing and involvement in starting the winery, but in this venture, I was lost.

I did all the things you’re told to do — set up a website, get business cards, find a space to see clients, etc — but still, the clients and income weren’t coming in quick enough.

I realized that although I wasn’t giving up on my dream of my own nutrition practice, I also needed to earn some money, pronto. So when an email landed in my inbox one day announcing that a well known nutrition and fitness expert was looking for a Wellness Coach, I applied immediately. Lucky for me, I got the job.

I came to work for this person believing that here was someone who had it all figured out. She had a successful business and I would learn everything I needed to know from her.

Isn’t the truth always more interesting?

The truth was that she did have a great many things figured out, but… business was evolving and she found herself the same position that many business owners find themselves in eventually — they aren’t satisfied with the current level of their business. They’re burnt out from too much work and an incommensurate amount of profit. So this expert was re-inventing her business and I was in the fortunate position of getting to be a part of the transformation.

Although I joined the team to coach clients in nutrition and lifestyle changes, it became clear that I had valuable skills from my years in web design and marketing that were sorely needed. Over time, I gave up my coaching duties and transitioned into marketing and launch management.

Along the way, we got some things horribly wrong and some things fabulously right. We experimented, tweaked, and refined. We studied successful entrepreneurs and learned from some of the biggest names in internet marketing. We learned.

So that’s how I’ve ended up back in the world of internet marketing. Today I live and breathe it. I coach and manage launches for doctors, nutritionists, wellness professionals, self-help gurus, authors, and entrepreneurs all over the country.

What I’ve realized is that there’s not a business in the world that can afford to be ignorant about this new marketing medium. It’s not just important — it’s mission-critical.

The difference between businesses that are thriving in this economy versus those that are just surviving or worse, comes down to how well they are leveraging the key areas of internet marketing, including website design, email marketing, joint ventures, social media, and more.

My goal is to help you to leverage the power of internet marketing for more clients, more sales, and more profits.

But don’t be fooled… it involves a ton of hard work. Anyone that tells you otherwise is full of it. The promise of a “get rich quick” scheme is a mirage.

On the flip side, if you seek out education and the best resources to help you along the way, there’s no need to struggle in the sticky mud of failure for long.

Seeking the sage advice of an internet marketing expert is like calling a tow truck to pull you out of a ditch. Only the tow truck driver doesn’t do it for you—she teaches you how to operate the tow truck yourself.